The invention relates to a container for receiving and compacting waste, particularly waste paper. The container can also be used for other easily compacted waste such as packages of thin metal, cardboard or plastic.
Until now, waste has been thrown into a rigid container, a wire basket, or a suspended plastic sack. Some of these containers are open and others are provided with a lid or cover. All such waste containers can hold only relatively small amounts of waste, because it cannot be compacted. The disadvantage of this is that the waste containers must be frequently emptied, and that those containers used in public are often overfull since they can't be emptied often enough, and as a result waste is strewn around the ground next to the container. This is particularly true of waste containers provided in many public restrooms for paper hand towels.
There are, in addition, known devices for compacting the waste in a container (German OS No. 19 23 396 or U.S. Pat. No. 3,696,737), in which, as a rule, a compacting plate is moved inside the container by a very complicated and, thus, costly and malfunctionprone mechanism to simultaneously compact the entire contents of the container under great force. These known devices cannot, however, satisfactorily solve the overflow problem in public containers, because on the one hand a container cannot hold an adequate amount of waste and on the other hand special operation procedures must be carried out by trained personnel to compact the contents of the container.